Midday

Autumn is finally here! And we are truly catching up on some missed rain. I have been looking forward to Autumn a lot, since the weather we've had recently was so hot that it was hard to wear lolita outfits. However with this rain I am now more worried about how I will keep dry...

Yesterday, I had my miniature portable photo studio arrive, so I will be able to take better photographs of my accessories to put into my wardrobe. I took a few photos already, but they were mostly of kuromi plush, as well as some of my smaller sized dolls. I also took a photograph of a model car that I was really proud of. I will be taking more photos this evening, and perhaps I will upload some onto here.

I wanted to talk a little about rebranding my website to be Crow Queen instead of Doll Lashes. I had chosen Doll-Lashes as my url just because it was the same as my tumblr account. I was talking to my boyfriend about it on Sunday since he asked what I had been so busy with recently, and he was surprised that I'd chosen that as my username, since he knew that I wasn't going to be posting anything about makeup or eyelashes. I thought about this a little, and decided that it did feel a little misleading, especially as my eyelashes aren't exactly anything special either. So I decided to change it to Crow Queen. I really like corvids, and I had used them a lot in the design of my website so far. It's the name I have my phone named as for anonymity on things like Airdrop, and I just felt like it would maybe be a good choice for a name for my website.

This journal page currently exists without any navigation for a journal. I think this should be fine, I actually felt weird to add navigation to a journal without having any pages to navigate to, so I prefer to do it this way. At some point I'd like to upload coordinate pictures onto here, that way I can explain a little about my ideas behind each coordinate that I do. I've seen other people do this and I thought it might be fun to add these kinds of details to my website. I also have been thinking about adding just general lolita thoughts. I'd prefer to keep it relevant to things that work with my website's topics. I'd also like to adjust the styling of my journal compared to the rest of my website, so I'll maybe be thinking about how I can do this over the coming days.

Right now, however, my main work on this website is futureproofing my wardrobe galleries! I've been updating them to work in a way where I am not having to repeat the changes across each individual entry. I really wanted to make use of a template to make any changes in one file, but unfortunately neocities doesn't support any scripting that doesn't happen in the browser, so it's not possible to do this in the way that I wanted to. In any case, this way of doing it is still a lot better, and has made my wardrobe files a lot more manageable going forward.

I also added a page where I can share information about my pets, I have called this page familiars. I wanted to add information about my real life pets - I have 2 cats called Elvis and Vlad - and also my virtual pets. This is a category which will be for both the clicker pet kind of pets that you might see in forums, as well aspotentially information about my real life tamagotchi devices that I own. I don't really want to add information about individual tamagotchi pets, since these would need to be updated too frequently.

Evening

Recently there was a rerelease of the Moi Meme Moitie Iron Gate JSK, for which I have been quite interested in watching the response within the lolita community due to recent complaints around the quality of Moitie releases. As of today it hasn't sold out on Wunderwelt, which for many people was surprising, since the original release is so highly valued within the gothic community. But others were less surprised, and had expressed that they would rather wait for previous releases of the JSK to show up on the secondhand market, or they otherwise had their reservations around purchasing via Wunderwelt.

Well, currently Atelier Pierrot are a much nicer purchasing experience than Wunderwelt for international customers, due to their great quality control, their good value deals on shipping, their efforts to send items quickly, and their friendly and helpful English speaking customer service specialist on Instagram. And rumour has it that the JSK has sold fairly well via the Atelier Pierrot store. But still it is in stock in this store too. I suppose there are potentially other factors. I wonder, is there less interest in moitie overall after their other recent rereleases being a bit lackluster in the quality department, or perhaps they were well prepared for the rerelease of such a well known item, and wanted to ensure that anybody who wanted one could have one.

In any case, this release's quality has been praised by figures that I respect in lolita fashion, and complaints have been defended against. Concerns regarding the release's fabric being polyester have been defended, with pointing out that earlier releases have been polyester too. Questions regarding the opacity of the fabric (after a recent rerelease of the Rose Lace Cross JSK being not very opaque) have been answered by this picture of Satsuki from the Atelier Pierrot store, wearing the white jsk with a black petticoat:

Overall I think based on the various feedback that if you've been in search of the Iron Gate JSK for a long time, then this rerelease is probably worth going for. But for me, I feel that it isn't really my style, so I won't be purchasing. I hadn't been interested in purchasing it anyway, so the rerelease was really not very relevant to me. However, I really loved the velveteen rerelease they did last year, and I am rather looking forward to receiving my tablier from the collaboration that Moitie did with Baroque.